MADA Students Fashionable Building Art

Students from Monash University Art, Design and Architecture have transformed a selection of ten iconic Melbourne buildings into wearable art, including RMIT’s Design Hub by Sean Godsell, ACCA by Wood Marsh and the new Melbourne School of Design by John Wardle and NADAA.

Working in collaboration with the architects as well as artist Callum Morton, fashion designer Miriam Borcherdt and architect Cate Hall, the designs dissect the buildings’ language into human scale, exploring the way the tectonics react to human movement.

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They use a range of techniques from folding and pleating, to wrapping and draping.

Architecturally, the effects of surface design can be seen in many of the designs as they are a literal translation of a building’s facade into a textile.

The 1931 Beaux-Arts ball where New York’s architectural elite dressed up as their building

The project is inspired by the legendary 1931 costume ball of the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects, in which over twenty of New York’s preeminent architects of the time dressed up as a building they had designed – including Ralph Walker as the Wall Street Building, and William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building, and Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria.

It’s a tradition that lives on in many of New York’s architecture schools.

Miriam Borcherdt is a fashion and textile designer, researcher and educator. She grew up between Germany and rural Italy, studied in the United States at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has worked in the design houses of Romeo Gigli in Milan and John Galliano in Paris.

Miriam has been living in Australia since 1998, and was one of the founding members of the Perth-based Central Office of Design and Architecture (Coda Studio).

In 1999 she founded ‘munk’, a progressive womenswear label that explores and extends upon her long-held preoccupation with—and research into—form, texture and surface pattern.

In 2011 Miriam set aside the womenswear label to focus entirely on the munk FELT homeware range.

Before that, in 2006, she co-founded and launched experimental retail store The Signet Bureau with Melbourne-based shoemakers Preston Zly.

She also works with the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre to create hand-crafted objects, and has taught at both RMIT and Monash University.

About Callum Morton

Head of Fine Art at Monash University Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), Callum Morton is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist and designer, considered one of Australia’s foremost creative thinkers.

His work deals with architecture and the impacts of built spaces.

He has exhibited in several international galleries and represented Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale; in 2011, his work was the subject of a twenty-year survey exhibition at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art.

For the 2014 Biennale of Sydney, he transformed Cockatoo Island’s Dog Leg Tunnel into an experiential, ghost-train-inspired journey—entitled The Other Side—and is currently working on Monument Park, a public art commission for Melbourne’s Docklands.

Working in the public and semi-public realm, she collaborates with other architecture and design practices on interior restorations, display systems and wayfinding elements, always focused on enriching the public experience within these existing spaces through fluid design.

Cate’s years working as exhibition and interior designer at the V&A in London, as well as at the National Gallery of Victoria, form the basis of her work on designing around, and for, the exhibited object

About MADA

Monash University Art, Design & Architecture—MADA, for short—is a place of excellence and innovation across art, architecture and design.

It incorporates research, residencies and the MADA Gallery, a public face for a faculty at the forefront of education in the creative arts and design disciplines.

MADA produces graduates with strong visual communication skills and the ability to think creatively; as inquisitive individuals, graduates develop innovative solutions to improve the world around them, and contribute to the social discourse.

Australian Interior Design Awards and Commendations will be presented at a gala dinner on Friday 23 April at the Sydney Town Hall (coinciding with designEX and the Australian Institute of Architects Conference).

Glenn Murcutt is Australia’s most internationally recognised architect.
This exhibition at the “Gallery of Design” profiles a selection of his built work and, through his drawings, his working methods.

He explored contemporary building concepts informed by a rejection of cloned, alienating, standardised and serially repetitive spaces, inspiring exhibitors and visitors with different ways of achieving alternative workspace environments.